forgetting ii

homo sapiens is not a machine or device for producing recognitions of the human, but instead a machine or device for producing modalities of not recognizing – it is (as far as we can tell) the first fleshed modality of forgetting.

the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of reciprocal blindness.  technology as ecstatic trance.  the created as a forgetting to remember.

technology is mysticism – mysticism commonized, globalized, reflected, affordable, redeemed through metal, sleepless, improvable, systematized, visible, accepted and acceptable, light, sensuous.  in short, a sleight of hand, for mysticism does not appear as these things.  mysticism does not appear.  technology is a collective magic trick of a species, a longed-for ruse.

technology is a collective human creation to remember forgetting.

if mysticism is the void behind poetry, poetry the void behind language, language the void behind the human, and the human the void behind mysticism, what is technology?  might it be the movement of this circle, the circle itself, expansions and contractions of the circle to a sphere through ruach, the sphere itself?  might technology be the machine of forgetting what is behind and the drive to expand the circle so as to prolong the meeting ahead of what has been forgotten?

it is not as if memory is simply being increasingly externalized beyond sarcous surfaces, but that its diameter is being stretched while it is equally being internalized within such surfaces:  at one point – the unseen collective black hole of interiority; at the other – vast diffused exteriority; in between – the elasticity – the human.  interiority the lost and sought memory of origins, of myth and time now recycled through factories and apparati of historical reconstructions, recreations, resuscitations; exteriority the relational facticities of which the internet and its techno-meteorological formations are the most obvious.  and so of the human?  isn’t the human neither point nor point, but an experiment in cosmological pliability, the between among points of opaque, infinite, and gaseous memories?   the human may hold nothing itself, but may only be this stretching.  memory may be a function of divine interiority and technological exteriority, the human only necessary to provide currency – that is, transmission – for it.  so from plato’s alphabetic fears to our modern post-apocalyptic dramas, there has been no necessary devolution in human capacity:  it has always and equally depended on centers and extremities, interiorities and exteriorities – the only issue being the mass the human negotiates (regardless of its loci).  what sort of risks does this bulk – its possible increase – present to the human?  this rephrasing (recontextualization) of plato’s concern, made possible by technology, shifts the ground from the qualitative to quantitative concerns … through the shifting, the tectonic linguistic-cultural disasters and displacements, the negotiations and fears, the human clings to its betweens:  the human, which may be nothing more than incarnate forgetting, this eternal between.

forgetting i

forgetting is not the opposite of memory, but memory’s vitality and operations.

we say a primary function of technology is to help us remember – but, truly, its far greater function is to help us forget.

a crisis of humanity is its historic overdependence on natality to perform its chief creative – and so intelligent – function:  forgetting.

forgetting is directly proportional to truth in a similar manner to truth being directly proportional to loss and darkness.

forgetting and time are less related through death, as humanity has been inclined, and more through emptiness, of which death is but a simulation.

forgetting is a primary portal of truth – hardly of words, hardly even of knowledge, for truth’s portals are misnamed in the marketplace and one passes by means of the arts of diminishment.

forgetting is not an act of denial – which is a counterbalance and force of memory – but an ascent of affirmation, an ascent of neither balance nor force.

are you running away again? a neighbor asks me as i head out.  i never run away but only towards, i say.  such is a call and response of forgetting.

forgetting, like unlearning, like love or art, is a path forward that seems to lead backwards.

time is a child of forgetting and volition; let go of volition to forget blood’s thorny strictures and pour into one’s empty self.

time changes, but not readily.  so the migration from solar-lunar time to digital-clock time has been bumpy, slow, bloody, with the sun and moon still there, awkwardly, in the artificial sky.  forgetting in a technological age is digital.

analog forgetting is magical but digital forgetting is factual; nevertheless, each is an equal mode of time, with its own possibilities and limits.

collective forgetting embraces and is embraced by – an embrace of living death, eros’ animate skeleton – individual forgetting.  in this embrace, original and reproduction transmogrify into one another, authenticity and simulation, being and seeming, forgetting and returning.

forgetting is an oubliette, a secret dungeon reached only through a trapdoor.  the seen stage is public and sanctioned memory, but the purchased and articulate drama is sustained by the powers of forgetting, that which is often called negligence or irresponsibility by the ostensible powers.

a given society’s configuration of memory and forgetting reveals more about concentrations of energy than any worth that might have become sacred in these configurations.

forgetting is a letting go of grasping, an un-getting, a slipping of named power, a losing from and of mind, a failing of force and story.  forgetting is renewal, protest, a way out.

forgetting is the oblivion we distantly remember, the newness, fear and awe that are a periodic table of alchemical elements of our desire.

i no longer remember – i allow emptiness to remember on my behalf:  more efficient, yes, but also – more precise.

today's topic

today our topic is language.  again.  i realize our topic was language the day before and the day before that and the one before the day before that and the one before the one, the one twice before the one, and thrice, and so on past numbers into the realm of infinite words, a realm that has been rumoured to be mythical but has not yet been proven by scientists and others given to proving or trying to prove or seeming to prove to be so or wholly so.  now in all these lessons in language – which consume our days to such an extent that we could say our days are nothing but these lessons – in all this time – which could be said to be such a continual consumption that it subverts itself and is hardly time but far more words – have we learned anything?  that we even have to ask the question is disturbing and this feeling too we wonder about – wonder many things, but as an instance, whether the disturbing nature of this question is in some manner related (and, if so, how) to time … and, since time is only numbers and numbers only words, more fundamentally to words:  in other words, whether language, though seeming to teach, actually doesn’t.  but this could be a difficult thought – perhaps the most difficult – as haven’t we devoted history (and its associates:  civilization, culture, war, government) to developing language to teach, as a sort of replacement for nature, as nature seemed not to teach anything (or at least anything we liked).  so language, in offering the possibility of teaching something (or at least something we liked), is turning out to teach us nothing and nature (though who among us could speak authoritatively of nature now, since nature too has simply become another word) is turning out (at least as fully in memory as language is in hope) to have offered us something to be taught.  but all this seems simultaneously too binary and confused to coalesce into anything we might rightly call a lesson.  yet we began by not calling this a lesson but a topic and this is an important distinction.  a lesson aims to teach us something, while a topic is simply a topic and has no aims other than itself, which is to say no aims.  perhaps this is the frustration – we want language to be a lesson while all it has the capacity for is being a topic.  or is it the topic?  to speak so definitively seems problematic, raising a grammatical issue of whether the definite article is appropriate in matters outside the specific, sensuous, and prosaic.  we can obviously say – see the cat over there – without raising too many issues.  but as soon as we ask whether language is a topic or the topic, whether that is a point or the point, the’s inadequacies reveal themselves.  which should not stop us from asking, some of you might say, even as others might say these problems and limits and questions have already been discussed and yet we still are here, we still go on, language still is language.  so what can we conclude?  nothing, certainly.  but perhaps something, just to give us a little morsel to chew provocatively even if it should give us some digestive issues or make us throw up or possibly kill us.  or if something is a possibility, are not all possibilities possible and so we could say nothing certainly and everything possibly and something not at all.  but this is hardly satisfying.  don’t we want something?  yes, we could say, with perhaps almost as much certainty as nothing.  and so here it is:  this something, which has already been offered, and is here again today, with our barely even having noticed.

saint antónio nogueira

on this most grand saintday,

let us celebrate the deathday of a great sadoo,

master of masks and vagrant in the city of identity

how he has taught us of the knowledge of the voids

and calmly, wittily shown the

root emptiness of the human,

the ways of dream

heresiarch hababala

durban, natalia

my biography

little has been said these long and secret years about the days and spaces of sadoo diaper – from whence farflung turds it arose, its innumerable flushings, the journeys of the scats, how it came to be numbered – if numbers are aspects of itself – among the sadoos, the incomprehensible ramblings of this blog itself, sadoo diaper’s relations with other sadoos and the non-sadoo community, its political positions, sexual preferences, and seminal influences, scholarly theories of its psychoaesthetics … all this has been left to the reader’s vivid or more likely mundane imagination.

no more.

fukky risotto, a hermaphrodite of little renown living happenstantially in the 13^th arrondissement, was not quite out of diapers when one cloudy day in february they felt a strange urging in the nether parts.

mommy, they say.

yes fukky dear, says mommy.

mommy, i have a strange feeling.

you have many strange feelings fukky.

this strange feeling is stranger cuz i’ve never had it before.

each feeling is new fukky, there’s never a feeling you’ve had before, that’s the beauty of feelings and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

don’t get philosophical on me mommy, not at a time like this.

oh fukky – always so dramatic.

mommy, it’s my diaper.

this is the fourth time today!

it’s not the caffeine, it’s something else.

have you been into the coconut water again?

it’s alive mommy.

what’s alive?

my turd.  it’s walking around in my diaper and saying things.

fukky, turds don’t talk.

maybe it’s not a turd.

but only turds come out of the asshole.  i mean – they’re the only things that come out that haven’t gone in first.

mommy you lie you lie.

of course i lie.

you said that all outputs are inputs and all inputs outputs, that the world is a great circle or sphere or hypersphere or something and that everything’s connected.

that’s true.  but that doesn’t discredit anything else i’ve said.  or rather it may discredit it but only in a way that credits.

… so whatever’s exploring my diaper now must have first gone in me … omigod i think it’s broken out …

… fucking jesus, i see a little hand print in your little trousers …

… get it out of me mommy, get it out …

… just pull down your pants and let’s see what happens …

fukky and their mommy were good to me, especially since they weren’t expecting a third mouth to feed and didn’t really have much money, being committed primarily to verbal play, speculative caprice, irrational fun, and composting the world’s evils by ignoring them.  fukky called me diaper and mommy called me doodoo and because i was a melancholic child she often called me sadoodoo.  when they enlisted me in school they gave my name as sadoodoo diaper, which got shortened to sadoo diaper, as these things do.

it wasn’t until much later that i realized there was a large class of sadoos – all of them crammed into india – and they misspelled their names.  being committed to retaining the proper spelling and origins of myself, i left – after much weeping and the promise of tweets and postcards – to go on a quest to find other true sadoos.  surely, i reasoned – and mommy if she taught me anything taught me reason – if i had been born into a diaper others must have been too.

the secular sadoo is the record of my quest, in a kind of code, that i know other sadoos with a little bit of work can decipher.  as to the fake sadoos and all those heaps of masses that aren’t even the fake ones, as fukky always says, who gives a fukky about them?

darkness iv

long have i stood at the doors of darkness, waiting for light to give me permission to enter, or even to push me through.  then one day i found myself – though i hadn’t moved – in darkness.  and i knew then that darkness roams, seeking, and if one wishes darkness all one has to do is wait.

darkness levels, equalizes, democratizes.  and so it is little wonder of the rarity of equality, the paucity of democracy, when darkness is equated with death.

darkness is doubt, and should doubt feel like death in this epoch of knowledge, isn’t this related in part to the ferocity and confidence of truth in its new linguistic clothes?

who hasn’t uttered upon noticing the preponderance of white on a page of text and yet it is the blackness that we read?

love, dissettled bird, sentimental sword, is of darkness and hides in light, and anyone who would love would first travel on this path of possessing and masking.

we have images of fire at the onset and demise of consciousness – at least that instilled to its present degree in humanity – as barriers of light between the darknesses of eternity and the darknesses of seeing, films of beginnings and endings hardly screened in the pitch of the universe’s vast and empty theatre.

i am a curious son of darkness, it has been said.  and – a curious son of light?  no.  a curious child is always of the seed of darkness.

i am necessarily indifferent to the sufferings of the world, unless they be prosthetics of my flesh.  should i confront this necessity with the only force capable of encountering it – hardly light – the prosthetics fall away and i become darkness, and my death is as indifferent as the world’s.

how beautiful is the nudity of darkness.  light clothes everything.

so darkness is the edenic dream, and light the fall into society’s bottomless analytic well.

darkness, rather than copulating with light, maintains a wardrobe of light’s fashions.  darkness copulates with nothing and light only with itself.

if darkness was once denial of flesh and is now flesh’s fulfillment, what is light’s trajectory?

everything interesting happens at night; day exists only as a place to tell night’s stories.

what is sex other than night seeking night through day, and failing.

there is always a darkness below (in, above, around) the opposition between light and darkness that is the same as light; the path to it though is a path of darkness.

when the nightmares of day are accomplished and i am permitted to return to my natural habitat of horizontality and darkness, i breathe with the breath of eternity, my true life of dreams commences, and the substances of hallucination are intravenously fed into the conglomerates of my flesh-soul.  time then is the joke it was meant to be, the ponderous politics of the human some rapidly dispelling flatulence, and money an annoying fly i just smacked on my face.

a human who inhabits darkness detaches itself from modes of production and there, away, becomes perpetually open to being created – form of formlessness and nothing manifesting but the open.

darkness is a human oriented with more or less equal measure to the languages that seem to emerge from within it and those that seem to confront it from without.  darkness could be said to be the confusion that results from a persistent uncertainty  about the source of the myriad languages.  does this darkness change, in some psychic alchemical sense perhaps, to light as one becomes comfortable with the confusion?  but if i become comfortable, am i listening, or has comfort become a dominant voice?  i remain in the doubt of myself – a doubt some might say is a dominance – and this is darkness.

darkness is the voices of form, its drought and flood.

i am in love with darkness.  the passages and shapes of light – its assertions – are to me dark’s rough categories, beckonings toward night.

darkness is the space that can be entered after use does not lose its use but rather takes its place in the domains of uselessness.

in darkness i work with whatever materials are at hand – weakness, wealth, poverty, power, betrayal, fragmentation, loyalty, unity – and darkness teaches me to be equally adept with all materials and tools, for the universe in its reaches knows no hierarchies – or rather, knows all hierarchies and knows that within this knowledge each subverts the other and is true to itself.  through the vastness of these truths, weakness and strength are equally powerful, impecuniousness and riches equally abundant.  darkness is democracy.

darkness iii

in the absence of visible darkness yet with its desire persistent, remnant, and present, with darkness having migrated from exteriority to interiority, our relations with it shift on psycho-mythic registers, and we seek for the unseen darkness in the human as we once sought the unseen light of god.  so the human disappears, while our seeking, while remaining infinite, turns toward our absent selves.

in the age of knowledge, with the human more tangibly and relatively omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient than god once was, darkness becomes the ungraspable, apocalypse the dream, disintegration the hope.

only flesh in its darkest knowledge can rise to look light in the eye.

to love darkness is to avoid in its entirety the statement – let there be light (and consequently let there be …, which is always and simply a variation) – and rather remain hovering on voids, exhorting nothing.  this is no statement of fate, any more than let there be light or money or love or knowledge be statements of fate, but of the indivisibility of fate and freedom and chance.  this indivisibility is darkness.

to exist on the margins – but rather, no:  to exist in places those with money and hierarchical social power name as outside the light, their light – and not attempt to move (or rather to move only among these places so named by such) is to subject one’s selves (oneselves) to visions that, in language, are given by and to darkness, but outside of language (or rather in languages other than language), and this outside given to a deeper darkness:  that of not knowing whether the visions are comprised of light or darkness.

to see, it is said, requires light.  and yet can we not say that the blind-from-birth see, yet through language.  words are dark eyes.  language has the capacity to bypass light and see.  this is its energy – energy that subverts the power of the beasts of the world and the screams and resentments they plod on.

and so when we say in the beginning was the word, we know the word existed before light, and the word was void, and vision was only the capacity to remain in relation to word.  so technology permits new paths of remaining in relation, new patterns of darkness, new visions of creating.

i take the lights of society and weave them – though weaving be now an art of industry – with the scattered skeins of my flesh’s black thread.  how do i know this weaving when its schools are destroyed and its masters dead?  i take my lessons in the night, i read the texts of void.  madness becomes my lover and emptiness my friend.

mysticism, as its more visible sibling, society, takes on darkness as root metaphor rather than light – for darkness is the present greater energy.

i am oriented to those without names in the world – not as any advocate to give them names or to protest their namelessness or even to judge the named in their greed for names and all that clambering entails or to become through advocacy or other means among the named – but as a naturalized citizen of the tribe of the anamed.  i recognize my kinspeople; we are those who find it difficult to breathe in the air of names; we are those whose rough and disturbing comfort is wandering in the darkness between creation and destruction, affirmation and protest, between the ruling and the ruled.  we are the nomads of darkness.  should we – through chance or fortune or talent or love – come too close to the republic of names, we cannot help but sabotage any process of citizenry that might be thrust upon us … neither through denial nor hate but an eyed and replete acceptance … and return to our people, the people of night and the impossible eternity of words, those who stumble, without object, objects, through the alleys in those dark regions that connect city and soul.